"It seems to me to be a process of looking for something in there, rather than having something and revising it. I don't consider that I really have anything yet--except inchoate mess. As I work on it, I'm always trying to hear the sound of the words, and trying to take out everything that doesn't feel alive. That's my goal: to take out everything that doesn't feel alive."

--Jean Valentine, on writing & revising

The Virgin Spring (1960)

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"You see how the smoke trembles up near the hole in the roof? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they don’t know. You shall cross a narrow plank, so narrow you can't find your footing. Below you roars a great river. It's black and wants to swallow you, but you pass over it unharmed. Before you lies a chasm, so deep you can't see the bottom. Hands grope for you, but they can't reach you. At last you stand before a mountain of terror. It spews fire like a furnace, and a vast abyss opens at its feet. A thousand colors blaze there: copper and iron, blue vitriol and yellow sulfur. Flames dazzle and flash and lash at the rocks. And all about, men leap and writhe, small as ants, for this is the furnace that swallows murderers and evildoers. But at the very moment you think you're doomed, a hand shall grasp you and an arm circle around you, and you'll be taken far away, where evil no longer has power over you."